The Perfect Meal (25 page)

“
How
many kilos of bones?”

I poured both into a bowl and transferred the bones to my biggest pot. In with them went three carrots, a couple of parsnips, three onions, two sticks of celery, three leeks, a bay leaf, parsley stalks, peppercorns, a handful of sea salt, and seven liters of water, enough to fill the pot to the brim. Bringing the mixture to a boil, I reduced the heat to a simmer, skimmed the froth that rose to the surface, and replaced the lid. I’d already spent half a day reading directions and shopping for ingredients. Just another five hours of cooking, and I could start really making the soup.

Eighteen

First Catch Your Market

. . . the markets with their pyramids of fruit, the turns of the seasons, the sides of beef hanging from the hooks, the hill of spices, and the towers of bottles and preserves, all of the flavors and colors, all the smells and all the stuff, the tide of voices—water, metal, wood, clay—the bustle, the haggling, and contriving as old as time.

Octavio Paz,
I Speak of the City

S
oupe à l’oignon
became famous as the meal of workers at Paris’s meat and produce market, Les Halles. Since opening in 1183, the complex grew until it sprawled across twenty-five acres of the Right Bank. In 1850, Baron Haussmann, as part of redesigning Paris, brought it up-to-date. To replace the jumble of sheds, he had Victor Baltard design ten glass-sided pavilions with metal roofs supported on delicate cast-iron columns—the
halles
, or halls, that gave the market its name. These survived until its demolition in 1971, when, scandalously, most were sold as scrap iron to the Japanese at a knockdown price.

Almost everything eaten in Paris passed through Les Halles, brought in overnight by horse and cart from outlying farms and abattoirs, or by train from farther away; the market had its own siding. A suburban farmer would load his wagon in the dark, climb onto the seat, and nudge his old horse in the direction of the city’s distant glow. Émile Zola’s novel
The Belly of Paris
opens with a description of what followed:

In the silence of a deserted avenue, wagons stuffed with produce made their way towards Paris, their thudding wheels rhythmically echoing off the houses sleeping behind the rows of elm trees meandering on either side of the road. At the pont de Neuilly, a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas met up with eight carts of turnips and carrots coming in from Nanterre. The horses, their heads bent low, led themselves with their lazy, steady pace, a bit slowed by the slight uphill climb. Up on the carts, lying on their stomachs in the vegetables, wrapped in their black-and-grey striped wool coats, the drivers slept with the reins in their fists.

Early risers in Paris were used to convoys of such carts clopping across the Seine toward the market, their drivers still asleep.

Off-loaded into the pavilions, sorted, priced, and put on display, the produce and meat flowed out again in the barrows and baskets of hoteliers, restaurateurs, shopkeepers, and housewives. Even the authors of the 1931
Guide des Plaisirs à Paris
, written for French visitors rather than foreign tourists, recommended a visit. In a way that is typically Gallic, it pictured the market as something inspiring, a living exhibition of France’s natural wealth, its
patrimoine
.

You’ll see the whole range of colors, from the somber green of vegetables to the garish red of bloody meat, the heaps of baskets, big and small, and the handcarts, pushed around by strapping lads not afraid of their weighty loads.

Les Halles at 7 a.m., 1910s

These porters, called
forts
—“strongs”—earned their license by showing they could muscle 440 pounds, the weight of two grown men, on a wooden hand truck. For a few weeks in 1928, George Orwell tried it but didn’t have the strength, so he quit to become a hotel
plongeur
, or “diver”—slang for dishwasher.
Forts
in the meat market were expected to carry the carcass of a whole pig or sheep balanced on their heads. An American visitor wrote, “Never shall I forget the sight of three huge meat-handlers, their long white aprons and turbaned heads smeared with blood, standing like three murderers out of a melodrama of the Middle Ages, and amiably discussing politics.”

As well as thirteen thousand regular employees, Les Halles supported a dozen smaller communities, including the urban poor. They crowded around the outskirts until the bell, or
cloche
, rang at 8:00 a.m., signaling the end of trading. Then they poured in, scavenging bruised fruit, discarded vegetables, and scraps of meat. Even today, the French still call the homeless
clochards
—bell people.

Other appetites were also catered for. Rent-by-the-hour
hôtels de passe
filled the surrounding streets where, day and night, prostitutes loitered, ready to satisfy any
forts
with energy to spare. As a little girl, my mother-in-law, being rushed past such a group by her nanny, asked why these brightly dressed women were standing in such numbers. Improvising quickly, the nanny said, “They’re engaged girls, waiting for their fiancés to finish work.”

The “fiancés,” called “
mecs
” from
maquereaux
, or mackerel—their tight flashy suits resembled the shiny striped skin of that fish—hung out in nearby basement bars, from where they could keep an eye on their girls and collect their takings. The same places were patronized by
apaches
, named from the Native Americans brought to Paris in Wild West shows. The 1950s musical and film
Irma la Douce
, set in the nonexistent rue Casanova, sweetens and romanticizes a sordid and dangerous milieu.

Among the pimps’ dives, the “most poisonous of all,” in the words of American writer Julian Street, was the Caveau des Innocents at 15 rue des Innocents—today ironically the headquarters of the Lancia Motor Club. “It consisted of a vaulted cellar with a doorway so low that one had to stoop on entering, and a series of narrow little rooms in which congregated many desperate characters.” The piano player was a
bossu
, or hunchback. Waiters and musicians in such places were often physically handicapped. Afflictions that might disconcert clients in respectable establishments were welcomed by criminals. Rubbing the back of a
bossu
was believed to bring luck, particularly to gamblers; sufferers from the condition loitered near casinos, charging for the service.

Le Caveau des Innocents

In 1910, dancer Maurice Mouvet was taken to the Innocents by a friend. “It was lighted by green and red lights,” he recalled. “They were oil lamps, and their smoke-covered shades leered down from the walls with a baleful glare. There was sand on the filthy floor and rough deal tables about the room. At these tables, groups of apaches were playing poker with their knives open on the table beside them.”

During the evening, a
mec
grabbed one of the
poules
, or chicks, and performed a variation on the Rough Dance, a country romp in which a couple playfully bumped and jostled one another. At the Innocents, the dance became more like a brawl, the girl begging for her man’s attention, he shoving her away, even throwing her to the floor, only to have her crawl back and clutch his leg adoringly. Impressed, Mouvet paid the man to teach him the steps and created the Apache Dance, which became a feature of night club shows around the world.

E
mile Zola christened Les Halles “
le ventre de Paris
”—“the belly of Paris.” That belly needed feeding—the task of such all-night cafés as Au Chien qui Fume (The Smoking Dog), Au Père Tranquille (The Quiet Father), and Au Pied de Cochon (The Pig Foot)—
au
in this case signifying “at the sign of.”

Socialites often joined the crowd at the end of a long night, slumming or looking for “a bit of rough.” The
Guide des Plaisirs
warned that the locals might not be as naïve as they looked. “The regulars here will sometimes ambush susceptible strangers on the stairs, persuade them to buy them dinner, then disappear at the end of the meal.”

“The crowd is extremely mixed,” it continued, “and very amusing. A woman in a chic evening dress will sit next to a working girl
en cheveux
.”
En cheveux
—“bareheaded”—was a slur: no respectable woman appeared in public without a hat, even around Les Halles. Visiting Montmartre, not regarded as particularly genteel, a British writer noticed that his lady companion “attracted more attention than she liked, for she was hatless and in evening dress, and all the others of her sex we saw were largely covered. In Paris, of an evening, two cherries and a piece of velvet are sufficient headgear, but [wearing] no headgear, except at the Opera, is looked upon as odd.”

Au Chien qui Fume enforced no dress code. It was too busy, even in the small hours. “At 3 a.m.,” explained the
Guide des Plaisirs
, “the ground floor, the small dining rooms on the first floor and the private rooms are all filled with people eating supper.” According to Julian Street, “The crowds stayed until morning, dancing, singing the latest ribald songs, occasionally breaking chairs and bottles, and sometimes shedding blood.” All this was tolerated as good for business. Burly waiters kept order, and if the occasional pickpocket or whore slipped by, that just added to the atmosphere.

At these cafés, almost everyone ate what
New Yorker
magazine correspondent Janet Flanner called “the rich, brunette onion soup.” Nothing fought off a hangover better, or more effectively revived the libido. It was never off the menu. Even when the cook had gone home, an apprentice could fill a bowl from the pot simmering at the back of the stove, float a slab of oven-dried bread on top, cover it in grated cheese, and brown it under the grill.

Onion Soup outside Les Halles, 1889

Some improved the soup with “a hair of the dog” by following the custom of
chabrot
—pouring red wine into the dregs to swill out the last scraps of bread and onion. Practiced since childhood,
chabrot
turned many young Frenchmen into alcoholics, the painter Maurice Utrillo among them. Others claimed that wine, like soup, was good for the health. According to an old rhyme, “
Après la soupe un coup de vin / C’est un écu de moins au médecin
”—A glass of wine after the soup means one less coin for the doctor.

In 1971, Les Halles relocated in a characterless but healthier complex at Rungis. The redevelopers created a park covering an ugly multilevel shopping mall and railway interchange. The prostitutes moved a few blocks east, to rue St. Denis, and most of the restaurants closed. Of the few that remain, some still serve onion soup, but the spirit of Les Halles didn’t survive demolition—except, briefly, in one form. While it was still a building site, flowers and vegetables sprouted from the ripped-up earth. Many varieties hadn’t been cultivated in an age. They sprang from seeds scattered over centuries—ghosts of the old market, clinging defiantly to life.